Cinema & confectionery pair up for chocolate festival in Provincetown

Thursday

Apr 11, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 11, 2013 at 11:11 AM

A screening of “Chocolat” at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 13, at the Waters Edge Cinema, serves as the first course of the cinema’s contribution to “A Taste of Chocolat,” a feature event during The Purple Feather Café’s sixth annual weekend chocolate festival. The cinema’s second course is a post-screening chocolate tasting, which begins at 7:15 p.m. in the cinema’s Art/Connect room featuring treats from The Purple Feather.

Loren King

The 2000 film “Chocolat” figured in a very funny moment in the 2009 comedy “I Love You, Man” when Paul Rudd as Pete Klaven tells Sydney (Jason Segel), his new man-friend, about the pleasures of watching the feel-good film. “Did you know that the best night I've had in the last five years is a night that Zooey and I split a bottle of wine, we made a summer salad and watched ‘Chocolat’ together?” says Pete. The neanderthal Sydney is horrified. “Your best night in five years is watching ‘Chocolate’ with Johnny Depp? You should be ashamed of yourself,” he replies.

Many, like Sydney, might dismiss the whimsical fable “Chocolat” as the quintessential “chick flick.” It has romance, a gorgeous, free-spirited woman — Juliette Binoche, no less — in the central role. It has Johnny Depp as a gypsy and the object of her affection. And it has chocolate — the symbol for all earthly delights. Like “Big Night” and “Like Water for Chocolate,” it presents food as a liberating, intoxicating and communal pleasure.

A screening of “Chocolat” at 5 p.m. Saturday, April 13, at the Waters Edge Cinema, serves as the first course of the cinema’s contribution to “A Taste of Chocolat,” a feature event during The Purple Feather Café’s sixth annual weekend chocolate festival. The cinema’s second course is a post-screening chocolate tasting, which begins at 7:15 p.m. in the cinema’s Art/Connect room featuring treats from The Purple Feather. For details, go to www.watersedgecinema.org. For more on the festival, visit www.thepurplefeather.com.

Director Lasse Hallstrom’s film takes place “once upon a time” in a stagnant French village that is upended for the better when radiant force of nature Vianne (Binoche) arrives out of the blue with her daughter, Anouk (Victoire Thivisol, who was stunning as a four-year-old in the 1996 French film “Ponette.”) A goddess-like single mother who shuns religious hypocrisy, Vianne opens her chocolate shop during Lent in the Roman Catholic town, triggering whispers that she’s a witch and inciting repressed authority figures like Mayor Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina) and Catholic priest Father Henri (Hugh O'Conor) to fret that these sinfully sweet concoctions, particularly Vianne’s saucily named “Nipples of Venus,” will corrupt community morals.

But the sweets and Vianne herself have the opposite effect on the townsfolk. Vianne helps Josephine (Lena Olin) flee her violent husband Serge (Peter Stormare). One confection inspires an old man (John Wood) to confess his long-unprofessed love to a local widow (Leslie Caron). Armande (Judi Dench, again giving a memorable, graceful performance) is Vianne's staunch, opinionated landlady who is softened enough by the mysteries of Vianne’s succulent sweets to reach out and make amends with her rigid, church-going daughter (Carrie-Anne Moss).

The comic aspects of provincial life are reminiscent of the short-lived ’70s British television series “Clochemerle” (available on DVD), with the great Wendy Hiller and Peter Ustinov heading a great cast in a lighthearted satire about a rural French town’s attempts to erect a public urinal.

Vianne has such a positive influence on the denizens of the town that the prudes and naysayers are powerless against her life-changing chocolate. The film stacks the deck, of course; the mayor and priest are no match for the luminous, sensual Binoche. But even the mayor, with Molina finding the humanity in this blowhard, gradually shows he has a soft center. By the time Depp, reuniting with his “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” director Hallstrom, arrives in the town with his ponytail, Irish accent and guitar, “Chocolat”’s predictable direction is one that anyone with even an ounce of joie de vivre is happy to follow.

With lovely performances from Binoche and Dench, “Chocolat” is a sweet and tasty confection. If one needs more nutrition from a movie than this feel-good fairy tale can provide, well, don’t forget the wine and the summer salad.

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